First Alpha Release of openSUSE 11

The development team of openSUSE has announced the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

Whats changed on this first Alpha Release?

The development team said that they have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

• Sat Solver integration: Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages - there might be suprises ahead.
• Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4).
• KDE 4.0.0, perl 5.10, glibc 2.7, NetworkManager 0.7, CUPS 1.3.5 and Pulseaudio.

As you know, The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, this program provides free, easy access to openSUSE, a complete Linux distribution. The openSUSE project has three main goals: make openSUSE the easiest Linux for anyone to obtain and the most widely used Linux distribution; leverage open source collaboration to make openSUSE the world's most usable Linux distribution and desktop environment for new and experienced Linux users; dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging processes to make openSUSE the platform of choice for Linux developers and software vendors.

You can test this first alpha release by downloading it at here.

Ubuntu Boot Menu with SUSE style

Now I will explain a very simple and effective way to significantly improve the GRUB in Ubuntu.

If you saw SUSE Linux, it is far more colorful than that brings Ubuntu default, and although it can be improved quickly putting a background image, sure that this kind of GRUB you like more:



It is quite easy to do so, as I configured both in the stand as on cell phones. Information is extracted from the Ubuntu How-To, but I have not worked to perfection with these steps, and they need to change a few things.

First, we must download the package grub-gfxboot and one of their themes. As I here use the Ububrown theme that I download from Ubuntu Forum like the image above.

As always, run a terminal, and type this:

Wget http://quasarfreak.googlepages.com/grub-gfxboot_0.97-5_i386.deb

Now we must uninstal grub and install the new (don't worry, it is safe):

sudo aptitude remove grub
sudo dpkg-i grub-gfxboot_0.97-5_i386.deb
sudo grub-install /dev/hda

Aware of one important thing: The /dev/hda must be changed to the correct path where we installed our Grub. To know exactly nothing better than watching the order to load the kernel in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Next, decompress theme zip file that you have downloaded and copy it into /boot/grub:

Message.ububrown sudo cp /boot/grub/

Now, the final step is simple, edit the menu of Grub:

Sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

At the beginning add this line:

gfxmenu /boot/grub/message.ububrown

Finally, restart and we have new graphical boot loader.

Enjoy!

Notes: You can use the updated packages of grub-gfxboot (last versions have support for amd64).